Similar to my previous post, here I will capture some of my recent brain activities 🙂
What are you thinking about right now? Pause and think before you continue reading. Now ask yourself the following questions: Why was I thinking about that? How did I feel? How did I feel when I thought about the previous questions? What other interesting questions can I ask myself? Why them?
The purpose of these questions is to trigger thinking about thinking. Meta-thinking is thinking about thinking, or beyond thinking. Likewise with meta-thoughts.
There are an infinite number of questions that can be asked. A small part of them will be shown here, but the point is not to write down all the questions, but to get into the habit of asking questions, mostly to yourself. Read a book -> new perspective -> more questions.
Observing situations
What is a good question to ask myself in this particular situation? Why that question? How is it relevant in context? And what is a good question to ask others? Why? How is it relevant? Before I ask the question, what are the possible answers I can or expect to get? If the answers are metaphorical, how would you interpret them? If they are literal, what would you do?
In most situations, the key is knowing when and with whom to be spontaneous, and when to rationalize. When and in front of which people are you spontaneous, and in front of which do you rationalize? What is the difference between these two groups of people? Which people do you think are spontaneous with you and which rationalize? Why do you think so? Which of these two groups of people give you more peace, and which do you learn more from? What do these answers tell you about you and your thought process?
Personality
How talkative are you? Temperamental? Anxious? Imaginative? Sensitive? Where are you on the spectrum between focus and daydreaming? Are you imperative? Are you a person of your word? Do you often seek attention, recognition, approval? Do you finish things or leave them half-baked? Do you often complain? How do you behave when you are alone? Are you mostly nervous or calm? Where does your nervousness come from? And where does peace come from? Are you holding a grudge? Do you avoid engaging in conflict? In what cases would you intentionally enter into a conflict and for what purpose? What challenges/things have you mastered in yourself, and which ones you haven’t yet? Do you ever think others don’t understand you? How does that make you feel? Why is it important to be understood? Are you able to delay processing emotions/thoughts?
What is your way of arguing? What is your frame of mind? What are the advantages and disadvantages of your framework and what are the other possible frameworks? Do you hold tight to your framework, or do you allow yourself to make changes? What other frameworks do you know exist? What would a universal framework look like?
How often do you observe your senses? How aware are you of your external and internal stimuli? How do you react to different stimuli? What expectations do those stimuli create, how different are they from objective reality?
Do you fixate on a particular solution/theory or do you consider all possible solutions? Do you often wonder what other possible theories or perspectives are? How do you feel when you found out that some of your solutions were not the right ones?
What is frustrating you? Why is it frustrating you? How do you overcome it? What can be learned from this frustration?
Coworkers
When you work with colleagues, what do they do? What do you do? How often do you compare yourself to your colleagues? What can you learn from them? What can they learn from you? To what extent do you extrapolate to predict how they will behave? Do you evaluate them sometimes? If not, why? If so, how do you know what they are good at and what they need to improve on? How can you improve your evaluation process and why is it important? Do you self-evaluate? Do you see yourself from a third perspective? To what extent is your attention to detail, your finding of patterns, abstractions? And theirs? Do you think about whether they are evaluating you? Do you think about how they think if you evaluate them?
Do you wait to be told what to do or do you find a way to be helpful yourself? Do others wait or do they find their own way? Are they copying your approaches? Are you copying their approaches? What approaches are there that you haven’t tried yet?
Wearing different hats
We often need to wear different hats depending on the situation and the people we’re interacting with. Just like loading different scripts for specific tasks in programming, we need to adapt our approach to fit the context and our goals. Imagine having a set of “bootloaders” ready to deploy, each designed for a different scenario. Here are a few examples:
mentorship-bootloader
- Engage the person more
- Talk less
- Asks questions rather than providing direct answers
- Stop repeating yourself uselessly. if intentional ok
group-hangout-bootloader
- Stay chill
- Talk to people
- Active listening
- See what you can learn about and from them
Any other scripts that you can think of? Which of those would you run in which contexts? Adaptability is key.
Closing thoughts
How would you change the order of the questions? What can you conclude from the answers to these questions about your character? What other self-examination questions would you ask yourself in addition?
How often do you observe your thoughts? How do you navigate the labyrinths of your own thoughts and your own complexity? What effects do you feel on yourself from that navigation? How often do you try to find out the things about yourself that are hidden in your subconscious? How do you connect with your subconscious? To what extent is your consciousness aligned with your subconscious? Can you overcome your ego? Do you often look into your own psyche, thoughts, emotions?
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